Stanlio

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Giuseppe Culicchia: Tutti giù per terra
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★
Walter is a young man from Turin who, in the 1980s, decides to do civilian service at an organization that focuses on the integration of nomads, while also enrolling in the philosophy department, but struggles to pass any exams. After completing his civilian service, he takes on various jobs, eventually becoming a clerk in a bookstore.

The book was adapted into a film of the same name, directed by Davide Ferrario in 1994 and starring Valerio Mastandrea, Carlo Monni, Caterina Caselli, Luciana Littizzetto, Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, Benedetta Mazzini (Mina's daughter...), Vladimir Luxuria, Mara Redeghieri from Üstmamò, and the full Consorzio Suonatori Indipendenti, the latter appearing as an examination committee.
Giuseppe Culicchia: Paso doble
Cartaceo I have it ★★★
- This novel aims to be the ideal continuation of the previous one, "Tutti giù per terra," which ended with the protagonist Walter becoming a clerk in a bookstore.
- In the new work, he coexists with Super Mario and Iper Paolo (aspiring models), with Egidio (a complexed member of the League who was abused by former employers), and with director Arnaldo Arnoldi, busy with budgeting issues.
- After leaving for a few days of vacation without notice, he expects to be fired; instead, in his absence, the director caused some problems and was ousted. The choice of an internal replacement falls precisely on Walter, considered the "least unsuitable." With the new salary, Walter's life transforms, and he begins to indulge in all kinds of luxuries...
Giuseppe Culicchia: Bla bla bla
Cartaceo I have it ★★★
The protagonist, nauseated by the routine and banality of modern life, decides to disappear and flees without leaving a trace. He rents a room in a foreign city from a woman abandoned by her husband, who has a fifteen-year-old daughter away at boarding school. He runs out of money and can no longer pay the rent or buy food. The landlady (in love with Italy and Italians…) offers him food and allows him to secretly steal food, even proposing that he stay and live with her. He declines and leaves the house, living like a beggar and reducing himself to hunger, searching for forgotten coins in phone booths, scavenging abandoned food at markets. He then decides to return to his former landlady, who in the meantime has moved in with another man, but while waiting to sell the house, she allows him to use it. Consumed by anger, he destroys everything.
  • MikiNigagi
    11 oct 17
    Basically, Ask the Dust without the beauty of Ask the Dust, in short.
  • Stanlio
    11 oct 17
    The one where Bandini, an aspiring writer, lives on oranges for a while?
    Well, there’s an abyss between the two, but I don’t see many similarities. Maybe it’s because I read it in the early '90s and my memory fails me, but I really can’t find anything similar aside from the hunger and financial struggles.
Groucho Marx: Groucho e io
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
- an autobiography of Groucho...
- from the very beginning, from the choice of name (Julius Henry Marx), destined to win the favor of an uncle whose fortune, alas, "turned out to consist of a stolen number nine billiard ball, a box of liver pills...
- Fifty years of American epic pass before us through Groucho's humorous gaze: the youth of the five brothers spent in Yorkville, on Manhattan's East Side, with their father the tailor ("That dad was a tailor was an idea shared by only him")
- we will emerge from this book dazed and happy, as if having watched one of Groucho's best films... (from Adelphi)
It's their debut album as an English progressive rock band from the Canterbury scene, released in 1974.

Side A:

The Stubbs Effect (Pyle) – 0:22
Big Jobs (Poo Poo Extract) (Sinclair/Pyle) – 0:36
Going Up To People And Tinkling (Stewart) – 2:25
Calyx (Miller) – 2:45
Son Of "There's No Place Like Homerton" (Stewart) – 10:10
Aigrette (Miller) – 1:37
Rifferama (Sinclair arr. Hatfield and the North) – 2:56

Side B:

Fol De Rol (Sinclair/Wyatt) – 3:07
Shaving Is Boring (Pyle) – 8:45
Licks For The Ladies (Sinclair/Pyle) – 2:37
Bossa Nochance (Sinclair) – 0:40
Big Jobs No. 2 (By Poo And The Wee Wees) (Sinclair/Pyle) – 2:14
Lobster In Cleavage Probe (Stewart) – 3:57
Gigantic Land Crabs In Earth Takeover Bid (Stewart) – 3:21
  • Stanlio
    7 sep 17
    Musicians:

    Phil Miller – guitar
    Dave Stewart – keyboards, synthesizer
    Richard Sinclair – bass, vocals
    Pip Pyle – drums

    Guests:

    Robert Wyatt – vocals (track 4)
    Geoff Leigh – tenor saxophone (track 5), flute (tracks 5 and 13)
    Didier Malherbe – tenor saxophone (track 7)
    Jeremy Baines – pixiphone (track 5), flute (track 13)
    The Northettes (Amanda Parsons, Barbara Gaskin, and Ann Rosenthal) – backing vocals (tracks 5, 13, and 17)
    Cyrille Ayers – vocals (track 8)
    Sam Ellidge – vocals (track 7)
    Clive Williamson – whistling (track 9)
Heinrich Böll: Il treno era in orario
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
Set during World War II, it follows Andreas, a young German soldier traveling on a military train to reach Przemysl and fight on the Eastern front. During the journey, Andreas befriends a homosexual comrade and a betrayed husband. Upon arrival, the soldiers decide to spend the night, before heading to the front, in a brothel. There, Andreas meets Olina, a Polish prostitute...
(cit. Einaudi)
- The facts, from which we might do well to begin, are brutal: on Wednesday, February 20, 1974, the eve of the Women's Carnival, a twenty-seven-year-old woman leaves her city home around 6:45 PM to attend a private dance party. (cit. Einaudi)
- In a preface to the story, Böll states: "The characters and the action of this story are completely fictional. In the event that certain journalistic practices are found to resemble those of the Bild-Zeitung, these similarities are neither intended nor coincidental, but rather inevitable." The author, who had firsthand experience of how media power can overlap with private life, distorting and deforming it... (cit. wiki)
Heinrich Böll: Foto di gruppo con signora
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
- ... tells the story of Leni Gruyten, a forty-eight-year-old German woman who "no longer understands the world and doubts she ever did." Leni lives on the fringes of post-war Germany's consumerist society, opposing the values of capitalism with her own world made of minimal but deeply felt and authentic values... (from wiki)
- Heinrich Böll takes on the role of a chronicler, following in the footsteps of all those who knew her: from the poet brother who destroys himself to escape the abjection of Nazism to Sister Rahel, from the businessman Polzer to the prostitute Margret.
Through photos, letters, personal objects... (cit. Einaudi)
Heinrich Böll: E non disse nemmeno una parola
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
- The novel reflects the issues faced by many couples in the post-war period.
- The title comes from the fact that in the fourth chapter, Käte listens to a song on the radio And he never said a mumbling word.
- Böll somewhat compares Käte to Jesus Christ: just as Christ endured many humiliations without saying a word, she too endures everything without rebelling.
(quoted from Einaudi)
A trial against Johann and Georg Gruhl is entrusted to Magistrate Stollfuss; it is his last case. They are accused of setting fire to an army truck at the end of a service trip. Numerous witnesses were present at the event because the two burned the vehicle in a field after dousing it in gasoline, and they did so openly: in fact, witnesses report that they sang to the rhythm of the crackling gasoline drums... Georg Gruhl's service trip involved driving aimlessly around in a truck... to the embarrassment of the prosecution and the judge, the Gruhls will be sentenced to damages and to six weeks in prison, which they have already served during pre-trial detention, during which young Gruhl also managed to impregnate the young waitress who brought him meals in his cell... (cit. Einaudi)
Heinrich Böll: Opinioni di un clown
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
- The story unfolds over a span of about three hours in the year 1962. Hans Schnier is a young clown living in Bonn, the city where the action described in the novel takes place. After yet another unsuccessful performance, back in his lodgings, Hans indulges in a long self-pitying monologue about himself and what torments him most: the abandonment by the woman he lived with, Maria.
- Post-Nazi Germany faced a long period of economic and social misery before initiating the reconstruction process. - The clown's lengthy lament provides the author with an opportunity to describe the conventions of that conservative bourgeoisie which was initially supportive of, or at least not hostile to, Nazism and, once Germany returned to democracy, was ready to reintroduce its rituals and prejudices within the new social framework.
(cit. Einaudi)
Herman Melville: Moby Dick
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
Moby Dick is not just the marvelous novel that everyone knows: it is a total book, where the Whale ("the Whale") stands for the whole ("the Whole"). (quoted from Adelphi)
Hermann Hesse: Narciso e Boccadoro
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
It is not our task to draw closer, just as the sun and the moon do not approach each other, nor do the sea and the land.

You and I, dear friend, are the sun and the moon, we are the sea and the land.

Our goal is not to transform into one another, but to know each other and to learn to see and respect in the other what he is: our opposite and our complement.

(Narciso the monk to Boccadoro the wandering artist)
Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
The success of the book came two decades after its publication and was buoyed by the Nobel Prize awarded to Hesse in 1946. It was largely the result of young people who made the figure of Siddhartha a compendium of adolescent restlessness, the anxiety of self-discovery, and the pride of the individual in the face of the world and history, united in an uncompromising rejection.
(cit. wiki)
Hermann Hesse: La cura
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
The Glass Bead Game (1925), which follows shortly after Siddhartha (1922) and is in a way “the other side” of it.

Just as there one witnessed a journey toward enlightenment, here we “unpack” a self-assured Western enlightened man, who is put into crisis by small everyday incidents – and from this, he is led to reconsider certain of his overly complacent beliefs.

But the endpoint is the same: in that “psychology of the cosmic eye” which is the great gift of Hesse, before which “there is no longer anything small, foolish, ugly, or wicked, but everything is sacred and venerable” (cit. Adelphi).
Hermann Hesse: Peter Camenzind
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
The story tells of a Suchende – that is, a seeker, as most of the characters of the German writer are – named Peter Camenzind, who leaves his village as a young boy to dedicate himself to studies and then works as a writer. A very refined character, through his pilgrimages he learns to know the city, the world, and humanity through experiences, sometimes positive and sometimes negative, that will mark him. (from wiki)
Hermann Hesse: Sotto la ruota
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
- There are various autobiographical elements in the story, as Hesse as a young man attended and was expelled from the seminary described with the 'diagnosis' of nervous breakdown.

- The young protagonist will have to confront, on one side, the demanding and cold pedagogy of the time (the wheel under which he will ultimately find himself crushed), and on the other, the deeper desires and inspirations he nurtures within himself. (from wiki)
Hermann Hesse: Demian
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
Written during World War I, it emerged from a profound inner crisis experienced by the author, leading him to make a radical turn not only in his literary journey but also in his existential and human path.

In Demian, there are indeed autobiographical echoes of Hesse's reflection on his tormented adolescence, which he claimed to have come to a rational understanding of only twenty years later, precisely thanks to this work. (cit. wiki)
Hermann Hesse: L'ultima estate di Klingsor
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
The autobiographical novel is set in Switzerland, by Lake Lugano. The painter Klingsor is just over forty but has had a full and passionate life: his existence, consumed by deep passions, is nearing its end. It is summer, the summer that will be the painter's last. He lives intensely but restlessly with his lifelong obsessions: painting, the joy of creation, friendship, romantic loves, the enchantment of nature. But time passes inexorably towards the final epilogue.

"A fiery and intense summer had begun. The scorching days, though long, fled like banners ablaze, while the brief and sultry moonlit nights alternated with brief and sultry nights of rain, the splendid weeks passed deliriously like swift dreams, overloaded with visions."
(Hermann Hesse)
Hermann Hesse: Il lupo della steppa
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
The book tells the story of a deep psychological suffering that strikes the protagonist at the threshold of middle age (the same age as the author during the period he writes the novel). Harry struggles with a strong conflict regarding his own personality; the path to healing is the reconciliation of the two antithetical and opposing parts within him through humor, laughter, that is, even in relation to oneself and in the face of the inadequacy of society and the entire human culture. (from wiki)
Hermann Hesse: Il pellegrinaggio in Oriente
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
Plot, the beginning:
The story of the Pilgrimage to the East is told in the first person, many years after the events narrated, by "H.H.", a German musician who, some time after the Great War, had joined the "League", an ancient and mysterious sect that had included some famous figures, both fictional and real, such as Plato, Mozart, Pythagoras, Paul Klee, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Baudelaire, and the boatman Vasudeva, a character from Siddhartha.
The group that H.H. had joined decided to travel on foot to the "East" for a very elevated purpose, although destined to remain a secret; the narrator also had a private aim: to meet the beautiful princess Fatma (from the Thousand and One Nights) and possibly win her love...
- excerpt from Wikipedia -
In this lengthy and complex novel, various themes dear to the author return, starting with the opposition between Spirit and Life, between theory and practice, between reflection and emotion. Hesse offers countless reflections and brings to light his strong aversion to war, and in some of his words, one can read an open critique of the Nazi regime. But above all, it is an important work on the beauty and delicacy of the soul, in its various forms and in the creations that it is capable of producing. Every page of this book is enriched by profound considerations on various subjects: from history to politics, to philosophy, to psychology, to aesthetics. (cit. wiki)
Hermann Hesse: Dall'India
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
In addition to the notes regarding the journey undertaken on the Indian subcontinent between September and December 1911, these writings testify to a lively and widespread interest in the European intellectual world at the turn of the last century. Thus, it represents an attempt to escape the anxieties of the present, from an oppressive family bond, but also and above all, a return to one's roots, to the distant cradle of a civilization that offers vivifying regeneration. In this way, India will increasingly lose its geographical connotation to transform into the hagiography of legend, understood as a universal quest for spiritual identity... (from mondadoristore.it)

"The East was not just a country or a geographical dimension, but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and in every place, it was the union of all time." HH
I Giganti: Proposta
Vinile I have it ★★★★★
Better known by the title "Put Flowers in Your Guns."

The text is structured like a journalistic investigation into youth discontent.

The three verses that it is divided into are performed in turn by a member of the group, giving voice successively to a young worker, a painter, and a wealthy son.

Binding the three parts of the song together like a sort of red thread is the voice of the "interviewer." (cit. wiki)
I Pooh: Piccola Katy
Vinile I have it ★★★★★
Despite "Piccola Katy" being on the B-side of the album, this song was much, much more successful than the A-side.
Ivano Fossati: Lampo viaggiatore
CD Audio I have it ★★★
On drums & percussion, son Claudio (then thirty...)
Jack Kerouac: Sulla Strada
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
- The novel, constructed in 5 parts and written in the form of episodes, is set in the late 1940s and describes the youth of the cultural movement of the Beat Generation, traveling across the vast territory of the USA.
- JK wrote the book at the age of 29, from April 2 to April 22, 1951, in three weeks, fueled solely by coffee, based on a series of notes collected during his travels.
- It was typed on a 36-meter long roll of paper, which was given to him.
- The "scroll" was auctioned off in 2001 for a price exceeding two million dollars.
- Rejected by several publishing houses, always under McCarthyite censorship, it was read by Malcolm Cowley, who obtained from the author revisions of several passages and the replacement of real names with fictional names, and recommended its publication in 1957. (I wasn't even born yet, and they call me old...)
Jack Kerouac: Il dottor Sax
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
It's a novel from 1959 considered by JK to be his best novel, telling the story of a Franco-Canadian boy from New England. It represents the literary transposition of the author himself as he relives the dreams, nightmares, and fantasies of his childhood.
Jack Kerouac: Visioni di Cody
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
There is a significant part of the hallucinatory conversations between Kerouac and Cassady under the influence of marijuana...
Jack Kerouac: I sotterranei
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
"Once upon a time I was young and up-to-date and clear-headed, and I could talk about everything with nervous intelligence and clarity and without all the rhetorical preambles I now indulge in; in other words, this is the story of a disillusioned person who is no longer in control of himself, and at the same time, the story of an egomaniac, by nature and not for jest — this is just to start off from the beginning in an orderly fashion and to elucidate the truth, because that is precisely what I want to do."

(Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Feltrinelli, Milan 1992)
Jack Kerouac: I vagabondi del Dharma
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
It represents the ideal continuation of the novel "On the Road." "The Dharma Bums" condenses vast meditations on Buddhism, thus forming the apology of the mysticism of the beat generation. The protagonists are the beats: Jack Kerouac-Raymond (Ray) Smith, Allen Ginsberg-Alvah Goldbook, Neal Cassady-Cody Pomeray, Gary Snyder-Japhy Ryder.
Jack Kerouac: Big Sur
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
In the novel, the three brief stays in the cabin owned by his friend, the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on Bixby Canyon in Big Sur, a location in Central California, are summarized.

In the novel, all the characters are mentioned by an alias; in Kerouac's case, "Jack Duluoz."

Kerouac's autobiographical character is no longer presented, as in previous novels, as a bohemian traveler, but rather as a popular writer.
Jack Kerouac: Satori a Parigi
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
It is a short autobiographical story about a man who visits Paris and then Brittany in search of his roots.
Jack London: Martin Eden
Cartaceo I have it
- It tells the difficult life of a working-class boy, a sailor whose name gives the title to the novel, who desperately struggles to become a writer, inspired and supported in this by his love for "Bellezza" and for Ruth, a young daughter of the upper middle class in San Francisco. The class difference between the two young people and the related difficulties for Martin to be accepted as a possible husband for Ruth by her family will allow London to expose many of his theories, as he was a convinced socialist.

- The novel contains a strong critique of the cynical capitalism that prevailed at the time and had forced many Americans into a life of misery and makeshift solutions. (it wiki)
Jack Nitzsche: The Hot Spot
CD Audio I have it ★★★★★
Original motion picture soundtrack, this is a true rare gem that I recommend. It features John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis duetting alongside two other great names in blues, Taj Mahal and Roy Rogers.

It is the soundtrack of the eponymous beautiful film from ’90 directed by the esteemed Dennis Hopper.
Jacques Bacot: La vita di Marpa il Traduttore
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
Marpa the Translator (1012-1096), known in the West primarily as the irritable and discontented master who subjected his favorite disciple Milarepa to unheard-of labors before granting him any teachings, was among those who contributed the most to transplanting Indian Buddhism in Tibet.
Three times he left Tibet to undertake perilous journeys through Nepal and India in search of manuscripts and masters who could clarify the obscure doctrines of the Tantras.
Among the many extraordinary encounters, the one with Naropa was decisive; after instructing him and testing him with enigmatic messages, disconcerting visions, and wondrous apparitions, he designated him as his spiritual successor. (cit. Adelphi)
- Milarepa was a magician, poet, and hermit. He became one so completely that Tibetans struggle not to separate these three characters, and depending on their perspective as magicians, laypeople, or religious figures, Milarepa is their greatest magician, poet, or saint. (Jaques Bacot)
- One of those precious texts upon which, with each new reading, one measures what has been understood in the meantime. (René Daumal)
- The Life of Milarepa is a biography - the oldest one that has been handed down - by UgTsang smyon He-ru-ka about the Buddhist monk, mystic, and yogi master Milarepa.
James Joyce: Gente di Dublino
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
The protagonists of the book are people from Dublin, whose stories of everyday life are narrated. Despite the banality of the subject, the book aims to focus attention on two aspects common to all the stories: paralysis and escape. The first is primarily a moral paralysis, caused by the politics and religion of the time. The escape is a consequence of the paralysis, at the moment when the protagonists understand their condition. (from wiki)
James Joyce: Ulisse
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
Ulysses is the story of a day, June 16, 1904, of a group of Dublin inhabitants. Joyce chose this date because it was the day when Nora Barnacle, his future wife, realized she was in love with him. The characters, by seemingly randomly crossing each other's lives, determine the unfolding of events, and describe it through a continuous stream of inner monologue.

Joyce, having anticipated this, said he had "inserted so many enigmas and puzzles into the plot that they would keep scholars busy for centuries discussing what I meant" - which would make the story "immortal." (from wiki)

I have never finished this book, but I have started it several times over the past 30/35 years; however, I won’t give up, and soon I will dive back into it because it is sooo important...
James M. Cain: Mildred Pierce
Cartaceo I have it ★★★★★
How cruel, and blind, that sweet mother’s heart is.
Muddy and hypnotic, the novel where the American dream turns into damnation.
The story of a woman determined not to succumb in the years of the Depression becomes the dark mirror of a society where work does not liberate, but makes one a slave and a torturer, where oppression is a habit, and violence is always imminent. (quoted Einaudi)